The BlackBerry Brain Trust

In early October, scientific and political bigwigs from around the world gathered in Waterloo, Ontario, to celebrate the opening of the new headquarters of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Made largely of patterned glass, the 65,000-square-foot complex has a soaring atrium, multiple fireplaces, a bistro, a squash court, and a 205-seat auditorium for lectures and string quartet performances. It looks more like a resort than a think tank where some of the smartest people in the world are contemplating the foundations of quantum physics. The elegant structure answers the question (as the architect put it), How do you design a place in which to think?

But the building's plush appurtenances just set the scene. Perimeter stands out because of a $66 million endowment from Mike Lazaridis, founder and co-CEO of Research in Motion; $13 million more from two of his colleagues; and $43 million from the local, provincial, and federal governments. That kind of cash can set a group of physicists free from the distractions that get in the way of scientific progress, like teaching and grading papers. Add to that a management philosophy that rejects the bureaucracy of a big university, and you're sending ripples through the fabric of research space-time.

Perimeter is among the handful of places that, over the coming decade or two, have the best chance of unifying relativity and quantum mechanics, one of the biggest goals in physics. Among other things, researchers are also working on the fundamentals of quantum computing. Of course, like all efforts to advance physics, Perimeter runs the risk of abject failure. It is 100 years since Einstein published his papers on relativity, and we're still grappling with problems that stumped him.

Piloting his Taser sailboat off the shore of Lake Ontario on a beautiful fall day, Lee Smolin looks like a screenwriter's vision of a scientist - wire-rimmed glasses, a scraggly beard, and windblown hair - squeezed into a head-to-toe black wet suit. (Subsequent meetings will confirm that he always looks like that, minus the wet suit.) He's the archetypal Perimeter researcher, full of respect for the world's great theoretical physics locales - the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara, Harvard and MIT in Cambridge, and CERN in Geneva. He is also quite happy to point out how Perimeter is, well, better.

"IAS is a great place," he says. "And they have this beautiful lunchroom with long tables. But one of their professors told us that for more than 30 years, the particle physicists have been eating at the same table, the astrophysicists at another, and the mathematicians at a third. So what did he advise us? No long tables. We want people to talk to each other."

It sounds almost silly, but this is the kind of thing they're always saying at Perimeter: The key to solving the most challenging scientific problems might be in the simplest of ideas, like the length of the tables in the bistro.

The new building incorporates a lot of that kind of thinking. It has a plenty of natural light and places for spontaneous discussion. A foosball table in the second-floor lounge has already become a popular venue for brainstorming and blowing off steam. The architects designed a nook for an old Mendelssohn piano from Perimeter's former HQ (a bar before it was a think tank). And chalkboards are everywhere, even in the outdoor atrium.

Of course, it helps to have a few of the top scientific minds on the planet. Smolin propounds a "fecund universe" theory holding that every black hole leads to another universe. Raymond Laflamme, the information theorist who changed Stephen Hawking's mind on the direction of time in a contracting universe, was lured to Perimeter from Los Alamos National Lab. Fotini Markopoulou Kalamara figured out how to introduce causality into loop quantum gravity theory.

The list goes on, totaling 39 appointees, postdocs, and grad students. The only scientist at Perimeter over 50, John Moffat, was a starving artist in Copenhagen when he wrote Einstein a letter in 1953, questioning the assumptions of unified field theory. It was an audacious move for someone who'd taught himself physics, but Einstein wrote back. The two maintained a correspondence and friendship until a few months before the older scientist's death.

Riding the success of the BlackBerry to billionaire status, Lazaridis is one of the most successful technology executives of all time. A lifelong science geek, he decided his chances for a good job were better in engineering than in pure physics. (CrackBerry users: Feel free to thumb-type him a thank-you note.) Even though founding Research in Motion caused him to drop out of the University of Waterloo more than 20 years ago, Lazaridis says he's never lost his love for the foundations of physics. RIM gave him the means to do something about it.

Sitting in his office at RIM, just a few miles from Perimeter, Lazaridis - now a chancellor of his almost-alma mater - looks like a man of two worlds. He's very much the boardroom denizen, complete with white hair, conservative gray tie, and Montblanc pen. But it's clear that his inner nerd is alive and well. You don't create Geek Fantasy Island unless you want to live there yourself.

One of Lazaridis' intellectual hobbyhorses is that when scientists figure out how to unify physical forces of nature, great change results. "Fundamental research is hit or miss," Lazaridis says. "You have no idea what could happen or when. The only guarantee is that if you invest in it and prioritize resources well enough, eventually it will change everything."

The unification of electricity and magnetism led to everything from the phonograph to cell phones. Einstein's unification of energy and matter began the atomic age and brought a deeper understanding of nature. And his earlier work on the unification of particles and waves led to quantum mechanics. Lazaridis hopes that we'll soon see a quantum theory of gravity that unites the physics of the vanishingly small (quantum mechanics) and the unimaginably vast (general relativity). "What will happen then?" Lazaridis asks. "Who knows? But it will be something big."

Quantum computing is Perimeter's most pragmatic project. "Moore's law will run out between 2010 and 2020," Lazaridis says. "After that, we approach circuitry that's just one atom in size. If we can't get past classical computing methods and learn to use quantum interactions to convey information, we'll bounce off the wall, and things will start getting bigger. That will slow technological development." Still, quantum computing is at best a long play. The record, shared by Perimeter's Laflamme, for the largest number of quantum bits manipulated to run a calculation is a whopping seven.

But obstacles haven't altered Lazaridis' level of commitment. In March 2000, when plans for Perimeter were taking shape, stock in RIM was trading as high as $78, and Lazaridis' stake was worth roughly $700 million. Less than three months later, the stock was down to $15, leaving his holdings at just $135 million. Even the most generous among us might consider trimming a donation of much of our net worth - like tech investor Alberto Vilar did with his notoriously diminishing donations to various opera companies. But Lazaridis didn't bail. The stock was back to $79 last November.

Perimeter intends to execute Lazaridis' vision by staying open about what kind of breakthroughs to chase. Specifically, while it pursues established lines of inquiry, the institute is hiring researchers with more unorthodox, nonmainstream approaches. "Similar approaches are taken by investors who pick stocks," says Jorge Pullin, a physics professor at Louisiana State University and a member of Perimeter's scientific advisory committee. "It's called being contrarian."

Searching for a quantum theory of gravity isn't particularly contrarian - it's a principal aim of modern theoretical physics. But Perimeter has chosen an unconventional route. Much of the physics community is chasing superstring theory, the idea that the fundamental particles in the universe are actually multidimensional strings vibrating at different frequencies. But Smolin and Markopoulou Kalamara are specialists in loop quantum gravity, which holds that space-time is a foamy network of intersecting loops known as spin networks. "So what if they've placed a few bets that aren't broadly supported?" asks Sylvester J. Gates Jr., a physicist at the University of Maryland. "In physics, it doesn't matter if you're in the majority. It matters if you're right."

Perimeter has also recruited thinkers known for interdisciplinary cooperation, a rarity in a field where specialization is the rule. Smolin, for example, derived some of his fecund-universe ideas from natural selection. Likewise Daniel Gottesman combined ideas from quantum physics to information theory to describe what happens in evaporating black holes. Such examples represent a quantumlike accomplishment in their own right: Physicists are not often found in two places at once.

Ultimately, though, it's not just science that sets Perimeter apart, but organization. Most controversially, Perimeter does not offer tenure, even to the most accomplished scientists. It offers five-year, renewable contracts.

Howard Burton, executive director of the institute, acknowledges that the absence of tenure was an issue for a few potential hires early on. But it also has its advantages. Perimeter attracts an adventurous group, most of whom came precisely because the place doesn't operate like a university. They can, in short, simply think.

"The issue of tenure was a tempest in a teapot," says Burton. Perimeter is open to cross-appointments with tenure-giving institutions like the nearby University of Waterloo.

However, Perimeter is even better if you're not yet on the tenure track. Postdoctoral students, the long-suffering second-class citizens of academia, have unprecedented latitude here. Sipping on a pint of Stella Artois in the backyard of the Jane Bond bar, an institute favorite just off Waterloo's main drag, Joseph Emerson says he came to do his postdoc at Perimeter for "complete freedom." Emerson still does the quantum computer research he did at MIT, but now he also indulges his other interest, the foundations of quantum mechanics - the bedrock of physics itself. Outside Perimeter, "foundations" is the Rodney Dangerfield of physics - it earns no respect and few faculty jobs, which means no one to hire postdocs.

Perimeter postdocs also have a say in the way things are done. During their three-year appointments, they have voting privileges - they even get to participate in the hiring of long-term researchers. They also have their own funding for visitors. "Normally as a postdoc, you're hired by an individual researcher who has a project in mind," says Rob Spekkens, who also works on foundations and quantum information theory. "But at Perimeter, we set our own research agendas. That's rare. In fact, that's exceptional."

Naturally, the institute has its detractors. Harvard physicist Lubos Motl breached the science community's general prohibition on public trash talk in a 2001 newsgroup posting that referred to the wealthy Lazaridis. It's a "well-known fact," Motl wrote, "that the billionaire's opinion of what theoretical physics means is naive." Perimeter staff deny that the institute is a rich man's folly, of course. (Motl, when contacted about his three-year-old missive, conceded in a nondenial denial sort of way, "It is appreciated that the billionaire gave the money to theoretical physics.")

Still, the institute's decision to seemingly "favor" loop quantum gravity researchers over superstring theoreticians continues to draw fire from the scientific community, though Perimeter has roughly equal numbers of both, and they all seem to get along. "String theorists usually come from particle physics, while LQG people are more from the gravity and general relativity side of things," says Jaume Gomis, a Perimeter theorist. "My hope is that we'll learn from them and they'll learn from us."

Then there are pettier criticisms, like cracks about the Friday night wine-and-cheese parties. Markopoulou Kalamara dismisses the digs. "I've heard about how spoiled we are, how the money is flowing through the halls of Perimeter, about all the free coffee and food. But the corporate sector has been doing that forever. It makes you work longer - you don't go home when you're hungry."

What would silence the critics? An important discovery, for starters. But Perimeter's real triumph, should it have one, will come from a more ineffable sense that things are happening there. "I hope we'll have a blueprint for a quantum computer within 15 years - or that we'll have discovered some fundamental new principle that explains why we can't build it," says Perimeter information theorist Mike Mosca. "What we don't want is to get so damn tired of trying that we give up."

Sitting in his new office in Perimeter's headquarters, with a view of a crystal-blue pond that is generously called Silver Lake, Einstein's old pal Moffat fields a familiar question: What would the great man think? "The reason Einstein was so successful was that he was a loner and always went his own way, even if it wasn't popular," Moffat says. "He had to be in a place where he could do his own thing and not be interfered with. I think he'd appreciate it if Perimeter turned out that way."

Duff McDonald (duffmcd@mac.com) is coauthor of The CEO, out later this year.